A file system of a computing device or storage environment may comprise an ever growing amount of user data. For example, a storage network environment may provide thousands of clients with access to millions of files stored across various storage devices, which may be replicated to other storage devices. Data storage costs and performance may decrease as the number and size of information is managed. In an example, a metadata file, such as an inofile, may be used to track information relating to files of a file system. The inofile may be a continue file comprising inofile records for each file. An inofile record may specify a file size, a device ID, a user ID, a group ID, a file mode, a last access time, a last modification time, pointers, and/or a variety of other information about a file.
An application, service, and/or storage administrator may desire to identify stale data that has not been accessed for a threshold amount of time such as for removal or destaging of stale data to slower and cheaper storage (e.g., a home directory of an ex-employee, a file not accessed for a predefined amount of days, an unmapped logical unit number (LUN), etc.) and/or to identify recently changed data such as for data backup purposes. Accordingly, the inofile may be completely walked to identify when files were last accessed or modified. Unfortunately, walking the complete inofile may be time consuming and resource intensive because the inofile may be relatively large (e.g., an inofile may consume 18 gigabytes of metadata for a volume with 100 mio modes).